Serhii Plokhy and M. E. Sarotte90 foreign affairs
ment would not halt at the former border of the Soviet Union. The eu
followed suit in May 2004, extending its border eastward to include a
number of former Soviet republics and allies, including the Baltic states,
the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland, Slovakia, and Slovenia. Since
Putin, a leader of an empire denying its own decline, still considered
Soviet borders significant, he viewed such moves as a massive affront.
These expansions highlighted Ukraine’s vulnerability. As one of a
handful of fully functioning democracies remaining east of nato’s
and the eu’s borders, Ukraine suddenly found itself in a particularly
painful form of limbo between the East and the West. Partly in re-
sponse came the so-called Orange Revolution, through which Ukrai-
nians made their aspirations to join the eu clear. Crowds flooded the
streets of Kyiv in November and December 2004 in the wake of a
presidential election of questionable legitimacy and succeeded in de-
manding truly free new elections. These resulted in the success of the
pro-European candidate Viktor Yushchenko.
For Putin, the Orange Revolution was a double defeat. Not only
did his candidate lose (despite the Russian president’s having traveled
personally to Ukraine to campaign on his behalf), but the democratic
protests in Ukraine deepened anti-Russian sentiment in the two other
states that had “color revolutions,” Georgia and Kyrgyzstan. Putin
was peculiarly sensitive to popular movements that could provoke
widespread street demonstrations. (He had served as a kgb agent in
East Germany when similar protests destabilized the country’s pro-
Soviet leadership in 1989.) And because he refused to accept that
Ukraine had truly removed itself from his domain, he viewed the
street demonstrations as inseparable from protests against his author-
ity inside Russia. In his eyes, they were all one and the same: direct
threats to the stability of his personal regime.
Yet the Bush administration concluded that this was the moment to
push for nato to expand further, to include Georgia and Ukraine.
The timing was terrible, as became clear in retrospect. The United
States had missed out on two earlier opportunities to promote Ukrai-
nian security at a lower cost: it could have given Kyiv the guarantees
it had sought as part of the Budapest Memorandum in 1994, or it
could have prioritized the more inclusive Partnership for Peace over
nato. Instead, the Bush administration was pushing for nato’s ex-
pansion just as Russia’s postimperial trauma was on the verge of vio-
lence. The administration wanted to use the 2008 nato summit in12_PlokhySarotte_pp_Blues.indd 90 11/18/19 4:22 PM